SeventyTwoTrillion

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SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @hexbear.net 2mo ago

the US and Israel literally does not possess enough industrial military production to restart the war in a year in terms of standoff munitions, virtually all the interceptors are gone, the expensive radars are gone, most bases in the Middle East are either abandoned or run by skeleton crews, there's likely a lot of stress on the aircraft used that will need to be repaired, and dozens of other factors that I'm currently forgetting, and mineral restrictions from China will make production of new military materiel difficult

if they break the ceasefire or otherwise restart the war soon, then they'll be attacking with the few hundred JASSMs they have left out of the 2000-3000 (total on the planet) they started the war with, whatever Tomahawks can be brought to theater, and then aircraft which will need to overfly Iran and get shot down. Iran has relatively little to fear from a ceasefire at this point in terms of Western perfidy because there's not really a ton of "regrouping" the US can do. We aren't talking about "oh, they'll bring in a couple thousand new missiles and interceptors and restock the bases and bring in an aircraft carrier and--", no, the US and Israel militaries as a whole are either virtually exhausted or coming remarkably close to exhaustion (weeks, not months) on a large proportion of the munitions they have used to keep this war going. If anything, I think Iran would have more to gain from a temporary break which leads back to fighting, though obviously if the terms of that ceasefire followed the US's 15 points instead of Iran's 10, then that would be a very bad indicator indeed.

So it's entirely possible (some are even saying "likely" or "certain") that the ceasefire is broken by the US or Israel, but unlike every other time they propose a ceasefire, I don't think the West has all that much to gain from a temporary cessation of hostilities that leads back to conflict. They can't produce anything of note, they can't move aircraft any closer to increase sortie rates, there's not much of anything they can move in-theater that isn't already there because of the missile+interceptor exhaustion. Realistically, the only major action they could achieve that would be an improvement to the pre-ceasefire status quo would be to bring in an aircraft carrier (big whoop), and bring in more troops, and it's very obvious to everybody at this point that boots on the ground in Iran would be a disaster.

Iran has finally, after two and a half long years, fought the attrition war they needed to fight. It's a shame it took that long and that many civilian deaths across the entire region to get to this point, but perhaps the Iranian reformist faction had to be soundly, repeatedly defeated for the internal stability to exist for an attrition war like this to be possible at all. Who can truly say.

I agree with the general sentiment that it's possible that the US may be planning to attack Iran again in like 5-10 years, but to be honest it's very plausible that by that point, American decline will have progressed to the point where they just can't do it even if they wanted to. and Iran will have been strengthened internally by the flood of economic benefits that a lack of sanctions and the Hormuz toll will bring, they'll have learned even more military lessons, they'll hopefully have even better air defenses, and perhaps even nukes

in the immediate term there are two dangers: the first is a continuation of Western attempts to cause internal chaos during reconstruction (basically guaranteed no matter what but the end of sanctions and the mutual experience of having survived a war and defeated the US and Israel will hopefully cause the populace to hold together). the second is that Trump looks at how badly Iran went and is like "Fuck, my legacy is gonna be that I'm the president who lost the Middle East. I need to win a war and FAST, I need a W heading into the midterms and beyond, and I need to rally the US together while the oil shortages are occurring" and immediately turns his ire on Cuba. There's not really any other meaningful bogeyman out there to bomb and/or invade at this point. They could try Venezuela again but it seems unlikely; they would probably be looking at the DPRK if they didn't have nukes; Russia's obviously doing their own thing with the Ukraine War anyway, and I feel confident now saying that China is never going to be conventionally assaulted by the US - ever - given what a gigantic problem Iran posed in terms of forward bases being bombarded and the aircraft carriers proving rather unhelpful overall.

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SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @hexbear.net 2mo ago

well, they aren't gonna fly in bombers when F-15s are still being shot down so it wasn't that

likely a bunch of standoff missiles or perhaps a Reaper drone carrying JDAMs like how they took out that unfinished bridge elsewhere in iran

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SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @hexbear.net 2mo ago

Not really news per se, so apologies for that, but I wanted to share ArmchairWarlord's theory of what has happened over the last few days with the pilot thing - I think it's the most plausible explanation as most others have gaping inexplicable holes or rely on strange coincidences, but perhaps people here have other explanations. Simplicius and others are coming to very similar conclusions.

In summary:

largeish wall of text

As has been publicly known, Trump wants to try and take Iran's enriched uranium, which is widely regarded by those with any sense at all as infeasible due the time and manpower it would require under heavy fire from Iran. Hegseth firing the generals may or may not be related to this (perhaps they objected to the operation), but the timing is, at a minimum, suggestive.
On the evening of April 2nd, the mission begins. US aircraft enter Iranian airspace and breach as far as Istafan, aiming to knock out local air defense so as to open a window for an extraction team in the coming hours or days. Exactly how much success they achieved is unknown, but clearly it wasn't successful enough because an F-15 gets hit and crashes.
The F-15 crash is reported by officials to be near a border province, for unknown reasons. Following information back to its source is very difficult in this conflict. [Personally, I can think of at least three reasons: Pessimistically, it could have been Iran trying to depict their air defense as more effective than it actually is. Optimistically, it could have been to ensure civilians weren't hunting for pilots in the vicinity of the actual crash and getting in the way of IRGC troops. Or it could have even been because communicating things in Iran in a timely manner is difficult given current constraints on sending radio/electronic messages with so much surveillance ongoing, so information was muddled or not specific by the time it was released to the public.]
The US certainly knew of the crash right after it occurred, and immediately started an emergency rescue mission that entered Iran in the following hours, flying very low, at night, and with few aircraft (perhaps just helicopters), to the site of the crash in Istafan. The pilot was located, put on the helicopter, and begun to extract. The WSO could not be found and was left behind, because day was approaching or had already arrived and so stealthily extracting would be much harder. By the time the pilot was on the way out, aircraft had moved into position to facilitate the escape - this is where we saw that footage of the refueling aircraft and the two helicopters (which were damaged), as well as the A-10 (which was hit and crashed into the sea).
At this point, anybody with any sense would say "Okay, mission is off - Iran clearly has functioning air defense and a strong military presence in Istafan." Trump does not have any sense. The mission goes ahead. The WSO is still missing at this point. Iran is likely looking for them with drones but is unable to find them as they are hiding somewhere and it's a wide area to search.
On the night of April 4th, the mission begins. The WSO, who is still near Istafan of course, makes contact with the US military and is extracted in a similar way to the pilot - under cover of night, with a helicopter or two flying low. At more-or-less the same time, five C-130s carrying a total of 100 Special Forces fly into Iran towards Istafan, making their way to an abandoned airfield not too far from a nuclear facility which they plan to raid and... do... something? It seems unlikely to any reasonable military analyst that they would succeed in carrying out all this enriched uranium without major opposition and in a good timeframe, so perhaps the objective was more about causing some flashy explosions and claiming that the US now had the uranium or had destroyed it.
These C-130s are detected at some point and Iran begins firing on them (the images of the wreckage have clear bullet holes/marks on the metal). This could have occurred mid-flight, or perhaps Iran noticed them landing and immediately sent out forces to counter the Special Forces who then fired upon the planes.
Clearly detected and the mission ruined, the Special Forces are commanded to leave before they can do much of anything. They ditch the two most damaged C-130s, scuttle them with explosives, and all fly off in the remaining three. The two C-130s that were blown up were not stuck in mud or whatever - they're designed for landing in tough conditions and the ground in the area is very dry. Again, the WSO was already on their way out of Iran on a separate aircraft while this whole fiasco was going down.
Trump sends out his post saying that the mission to extract the WSO was a huge success, as if that was the only objective and as if that required 100 Special Forces and five C-130s to achieve. Rumors of massive firefights and dozens/hundreds Iranian casualties were wild exaggerations. It's likely that some were killed and injured during the Special Forces mission, and perhaps the original mission killed some Iranian soldiers while they were contesting the airspace. But we aren't talking about a thousand IRGC troops getting mowed down by supersoldiers performing a lethal kinetic operation to extract a high-value operative against Islamic-style enemy combatants under classified mission code two-niner Foxtrot Alpha Bravo (that sentence should be read in Felix's operator voice).

Thoughts?

I've seen others generally agree with the idea but contest aspects of this narrative. For example, it's possible that indeed only two Special Forces aircraft were flown in for the mission and that three other aircraft were sent in later. It's possible that the landing site chosen by Special Forces was actually forced upon them due to air defense kicking in as they approached (which would perhaps explain why they were still a good number of kilometers from the nuclear facility, though apparently they did bring helicopters). It's possible that the two aircraft landed very hard to the point they were disabled, though most/everybody on the planes survived.

Regardless of exactly what happened, though, this conflict is being very badly managed by the US and I wish many more "wildly successful missions" like this, or however Vance put it, for the US military. Go for Kharg with something like this next, please.

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SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @hexbear.net 2mo ago

A North Atlantic Terrorist Organization Without Terrorists?

SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @hexbear.net 2mo ago

it does, but it's the setting up of those different filtration methods that's the issue

to quote NPR, who had a good piece on this recently with an engineering Professor in Texas:

(starting mid-paragraph at the relevant part)

[...] depending on what the composition of that crude oil is, what chemicals are there to start with, you're going to use different types of refining processes to get those end products out. We're set up to refine a particular type of crude oil that comes from places like western Canada and Venezuela and Mexico. But other refineries around the world are set up to process different types of oil. And so there are some constraints based on that.

Why can't we just refine our own oil here?:

Well, some of it is historic, and some of it just has to do with infrastructure. So the history is that there was a lot of refinery construction, you know, here along the Gulf Coast in the 1970s and '80s in response to the oil price shocks that we experienced back then. And at the time, a lot of oil was coming out of Venezuela. So they were set up to process all that Venezuelan crude. And once that started to dry up back in the 1990s, they were able to replace that with this heavier crude from other places.
Now, there's also an infrastructure problem. Let me give you a good example. Refineries in California generally are processing crude oil that comes from the Middle East and Asia. And you might ask why, you know, if we're producing all this oil in the U.S. And the reason is that there's just not enough pipeline capacity to move oil produced here in Texas over to California where it could be refined. And the same is true for a lot of places on the East Coast. There is a real lack of pipeline capacity to move oil around within the country.

Why not build more refineries?:

There's a couple of reasons. One is that building refinery is a really expensive proposition. It's, you know, many billions of dollars to do that. Even retrofitting an existing refinery to refine a different type of crude oil, you're spending tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to do that. And the problem with having that type of capital expenditure of that amount is that if you're a business, you're only going to do that if you see a long-term demand for the products that are going to come out of your refinery. If we're looking at a relatively short-term change in the demand for your product, you're not going to go ahead and spend that money. You're just going to try to weather it out. And so that's the situation we're in right now.

My point in my comment was that you can't just look at the amount of oil you currently produce (or could produce if production is increased) and look at the amount of oil you need to fulfil domestic demand and say "well, if the first number is bigger than the second number, we're alright." You have to get the oil to the refineries that were previously processing Middle Eastern crude oil (AKA pipeline construction), and then retrofit those refineries to handle the specific kind of oil you're pumping, both of which are expensive and take time. Or, you could build new refineries closer to the oil sources specifically for processing the oil you drill, but that would also be expensive and take time. And because of neoliberalism deciding that importing crude oil from the Middle East and processing it is cheaper (and thus better) than processing your own oil, plus the faulty assumption that your supply of oil from the MIddle East would never be disrupted, the US is still gonna get hit hard from the Hormuz closure, no matter what Trump says about how the US "doesn't actually rely on Hormuz at all, it's only our allies". Either he doesn't understand this and is being stupid (I can imagine White House staffers trying to explain it to him and he just gets bored and walks off to watch a video of strikes on Iran with Subway Surfers on the side), or he does secretly understand this and is bluffing.

A US that properly prepared for the Iran War would have seen the construction of more refineries able to handle US oil in the years before the planned date of the conflict such that they truly were more insulated from a Hormuz closure, as well as filling up the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But the US, or at a minimum the Trump administration, seems to lack any kind of long term planning.

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SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @hexbear.net 2mo ago

seems to be the case, yeah

even before the war started, there were people who were speculating about whether the Iranian plan was to try and withstand the first month or so as best they could and put up just enough resistance with their air defenses to prevent Western aircraft from feeling safe overflying Iran, and then once the West became critically low on standoff munitions and felt forced to fly aircraft directly over the airspace, then you bring out all the stuff you've hidden underground and start shooting down the aircraft, which are AFAIK considerably easier and more productive (and, let's be honest, more impressive for propaganda purposes) to shoot down compared to JASSMs

seems like a pretty good strategy to me IF AND ONLY IF you feel confident you can withstand a month of missile fire, but of course Iran can do that because their missiles cities cannot be destroyed by missiles. and now here we are.

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SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @hexbear.net 2mo ago

US has no excess LNG to sell. The LNG export terminals have been operating at 100% capacity for a while, they literally cannot send out any more than they already do.

it's been real fun seeing people online who think that this conflict is a 7D chess play by America to dominate oil and gas markets by pumping a shitload of LNG around the world and also oil because they're "self-sufficient in oil" because they don't understand how the composition and thus extraction location of oil determines what it can be used for

one of those "if only you knew how bad things really are" moments

SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @hexbear.net 2mo ago

it's hard to find good information on what the precise currency mechanism is going to be with the Iranian toll system, like is it the toll that has to be paid in rial and then the oil itself has to be bought/sold in yuan or they won't let it pass?

but yeah, as you point out and I mentioned at some point in the past couple weeks (time in a bit of a blur right now), this does put China in a fairly complicated spot post-war because they'll have to make some significant adjustments to their economy in order to resolve contradictions if they're going to be handling pretty much all the oil and gas coming out of the Middle East, and while the adjustments required to make yuan a (not necessarily the) reserve currency would make them powerful in some ways, it would make them weaker in others (which is why the US economy is in such a weird place with AI bubbles and real estate bubbles and private equity gaining immense power and deindustrialization etc). like, don't get me wrong, I still think a communist-controlled China with control over a major reserve currency would be better for the world than letting the dollar continue to reign supreme, but at this point one wonders if some Chinese officials aren't beginning to consider Keynes' bancor idea more seriously

but I think regardless of whether a toll serves the grander goal of global dedollarization, pricing the toll in a non-dolllar currency is good because it grants the US meaningfully less non-military control over global energy flows (which will have all sorts of knock-on effects), and also it being the Iranian rial in particular will cause there to be demand for gaining rial in other countries to pay the toll, which means you're gonna have to engage with the Iranian economy if you want fuel and energy, which means either you have to lobby the US to get rid of all the sanctions, or you're gonna have to try and subvert/ignore the sanctions (which would imply joining up with Russian and Chinese economic mechanisms so your economy isn't fucked by being isolated by the US)

for years I've held that dedollarization is gonna take a good couple decades at the minimum to fully occur because there's so many complications to resolve, and sometimes the progress isn't going to look like progress until there's sudden ruptures or major deals. in december 2025, saying "I think Iran should blockade Hormuz and set it up such that in order to pass, you need to pay for the oil in yuan" would be regarded as the delusional wishcasting of a dedollarization-obsessed idiot, whereas a mere three months later it's rapidly becoming reality

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SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @hexbear.net 2mo ago

I think the idea is that the US could have hypothetically won in Iraq in military terms, but doing so would have required them to do things that they were ideologically incapable of, like not killing hundreds of thousands of civilians out of rage and spite, as well as a much greater commitment to actually developing Iraq instead of plundering it

in practice, of course, this means that they couldn't have won because the superstructure and the base are both vital components and neither can be dismissed. for a crude analogy, I am physically capable of putting my hand on a hot stove for five straight minutes, but mentally it would almost certainly be impossible for me to actually do that

however, in Iran, there isn't even really a military argument currently that the US can defeat Iran, regardless of whether the US would be ideologically willing to do what it would take (drafting an absolute minimum of one million troops, training them, equipping them, transporting them to the Middle East, taking casualties while staging them, which would take years while the world goes through the worst energy and fuel crisis it has ever faced)

SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @hexbear.net 2mo ago

Assad is the world's protagonist and everybody else is just a side character in his story

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SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @hexbear.net 2mo ago

I'm not saying that I believe that the US is at risk of coup due to palace infighting - though an American Prigozhin would be very, very funny - but I do feel like a majority of governments in the position that the US is currently in would have had the leader... "encouraged" to step down by some other figure in order to take control and stop the catastrophic damage the empire is doing to itself

I really do have to wonder if there's any really high-up people in the US government right now who are actually semi-competent administrators of empire who are at like "oh fuck, oh god, oh fuck, what do we do?"

SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @hexbear.net 2mo ago

I mean, it can happen and isn't always bad

especially if the guy you're firing sucked at his job and the new guy happens to be better

though in this case I have to agree that it's a bit of an ill omen. I don't know anything about LaNeve but based on the general trajectory of things I'd be surprised if he's more competent

SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @hexbear.net 2mo ago

Proximity to the US is a major factor, we've already seen how the US is becoming increasingly logistically constrained as the Ramadan War consisted of airlifts rather than sealifts

China, Russia, and Iran will gradually push the US out of Eurasia and the Pacific, leaving Europe and Africa. Africa is gonna be third last IMO because the US will want to hang on to it for the resource potential but the combination of unpayable debt and developmentalism from China seems likely to promote the creation of anti-US and pro-China countries, though several will be dragged kicking and screaming. Europe's fucked in the long term as long as it follows American dictates which creates an incentive to eventually separate in policy and pursue rapprochement with Russia and closer ties with China, though they'll likely be the second last region to go because creating the political will to do so and supplanting the Atlanticist ghouls will take a couple decades. They'll probably collectively end up as a subimperial power like India; not really pro China or pro US, still trying to maximally exploit foreign nations and their people, lots of reactionary sentiment.

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SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @hexbear.net 2mo ago

People, people, they have the biggest dam I've ever seen. It's right over the strait, the Iranians dropped it in, and now it's a wall there. Concrete. Now, Iranian concrete, it's not that great, I've had some very smart generals come to me and say that it's not the best, but still good enough to block the whole thing. I've been about to destroy it many times, because we gotta make a big hole in the wall, so the ships can get past it. They're stuck, they're too afraid to get past the big concrete wall there. We've told them to ram it, many of our handsome admirals have suggested quite politely to just sail right in. Bam! But no, they're too scared. Iran doesn't even have a military or navy anymore, but they just won't move. So I've had many phone calls, with many leaders around the world - some of which you wouldn't expect! - and they've told me to destroy the big dam to let the ships pass. But I've told them that it's their problem, not mine. We don't need the strait or the oil, we pump our own oil, more and more every day in fact. I told them that they can bomb the big concrete wall in the strait if they want, because we don't need to do it at all. Waste of time. That's what I told them, it would be a waste of time for our fantastic pilots, very lethal and very smart people, I've met a few. And they beg me, these leaders, and Iran too, can't forget them - they beg me to stop the war. Well, it ended a month ago really, it was over before it even began. So much damage, some of the biggest explosions I've ever seen in my life. In the history of America, probably. Thousands and thousands of them, all day long. Iran put up the wall and now they can't get rid of it. It's too heavy, and too tough for their weak missiles to destroy. Weak. They really aren't sending their best missiles, folks, but none can compare to us anyway. But I told them, we don't care. Sort it out. We're done with this war, and we have a great future ahead. One of the greatest, some are even saying, I've seen the reports.

SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @hexbear.net 2mo ago

it not only could have been a tweet, it straight up was basically the content of several of his tweets over the last month

I rate this speech a Putin on the Speech Hype Scale - quite low, but not as boring as the EU's many feckless speeches

at the top of the scale is probably Hezbollah and the DPRK. when they have a statement to make I sit my ass down and listen. unsure if it was Hezbollah or Hamas who coined "they will enter vertically and leave horizontally" but the hand gesture Nasrallah makes is baked into my brain

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SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @hexbear.net 2mo ago

the disparaging of Rodriguez in several circles has been deeply frustrating and is yet another one of those indicators that a lot of people on the anti-US side have good military analysis have poor political analysis

since at least last year, I've held that 1) Latin America is likely going to be the last region that the US frontier returns through, 2) China and Russia can do relatively little to help militarily, and 3) military development in the vein of what we've seen in the Middle East (tons of drones, missiles, and underground facilities) has, for reasons I confess to not understanding (lack of impetus due to relative military peace for decades?), not really occurred in the region. in these circumstances, it makes a ton of sense for Latin American socialism to batten down the hatches, negotiate with the US and make certain concessions even if you know that it could just be a setup for invasion, and just try and survive a decade or two longer

if, and only if, peace with the US is impossible - they're making demands you cannot fulfil or would be synonymous with the end of the socialist project, or they just outright start bombing and invading you - then you can start considering waging urban and rural guerrilla warfare. but as I noted in the megathread I made when Maduro was captured, you can't just decide "alright, cool, we're doing Vietnam/Nicaragua now" if the conditions aren't right and the national social cohesion isn't in place. there's every possibility that you just get the government overthrown within the week and the civilians don't rise up to form militias and resist but instead decide, very reasonably, that they don't want to die facing US soldiers, or don't want to be bombed from the air by JDAMs for months on end.

maybe living under US occupation is preferable to a million people dying in bombing and starvation if you can keep the revolutionary spirit alive under that occupation and join together and overthrow the compradors at a later date when American imperialism has further decayed. or, indeed, maybe they decide that they are going to fight regardless of the likely massive casualties. at the end of the day, it's up to the people actually living inside Venezuela and Cuba what they decide to be the best course forwards, even if some asshole in Nebraska is posting on their fuckass substack something like "Sandino would be so disappointed..."